My IB Why This Matters
"That's a lovely inquiry framework, but I have forty pages of prescribed content to get through before the term ends." If you teach in a dual-curriculum school — MOET (Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training national curriculum) running alongside the MYP — this isn't a hypothetical objection, it's Tuesday. You've watched colleagues build gorgeous conceptual units for the one unit a year they had spare time to design, while every other unit stayed a content checklist because there was no time to do both. This article is the method for doing both, every time, without either losing required content or reducing the MYP unit to decoration on top of it.
Understand the Idea
Here's the reframe that makes this workable: converting prescribed content into an MYP unit is not translation and it's not compliance theatre. It's reorganisation. The content doesn't change. The sequence and lens it's taught through changes.
Let's be precise about what MyIBHub is and isn't claiming here. This conversion method is our own practical approach for planning purposes — it is not an IB policy statement, and it is not an official MOET–MYP equivalence. No framework anywhere formally certifies that MOET content "satisfies" a specific MYP requirement. What's actually true, and what we can responsibly claim, is narrower and more useful: the required content stays fully intact, and it gets organised under a conceptual spine so the unit also does the conceptual work the MYP asks for. Nothing is dropped. Nothing is invented as an equivalence that doesn't exist.
Four ideas make this practical:
Non-negotiable content — the specific facts, skills, or procedures your curriculum document requires you to teach, regardless of how you sequence them. These don't move or disappear in conversion; they get grouped differently.
Content mapping — listing every non-negotiable item from the prescribed topic before you touch the MYP planner, so you have a checklist to verify against at the end. If you skip this step, you plan the "interesting" unit first and discover missing content in week 4.
Conceptual reorganisation — grouping that same content under a key concept (Article 11) so pieces that used to sit in a flat list now sit in a hierarchy that explains why they belong together, not just that they're on the syllabus.
Coverage vs. sequence — the prescribed document usually tells you what must be taught, rarely in what order. That gap is where you have room to move. You're not reordering against the requirement; you're using flexibility the requirement already gives you.
See It in Practice
Take a MOET Grade 8 Physics topic: forces and motion, covering Newton's laws, friction, and simple machines (this is an illustrative, invented example built to show the method — check your own school's actual prescribed syllabus document for the real requirement list).
Step 1 — content map. List every non-negotiable item: definition of force; Newton's three laws with worked calculations; friction (static and kinetic) with everyday examples; mechanical advantage in simple machines (lever, pulley, inclined plane); a required practical demonstrating one of the above.
Step 2 — find the concept it best serves. Forces and motion is fundamentally about Systems (a related concept under the key concept Change, MYP Sciences): objects don't move in isolation — force, friction, and mechanical advantage all describe how systems respond to input and resist or transmit it.
Step 3 — choose a context that gives it purpose. Global context Scientific and Technical Innovation: how do engineers reduce force loss in real systems? A concrete, invented-but-plausible context: designing a mechanism to move heavy classroom furniture with minimum human effort, using simple machines.
Step 4 — re-sequence toward a summative. Instead of teaching Newton's laws → friction → simple machines as three flat, disconnected sub-topics (the original textbook order), resequence: Newton's laws first (systems need a starting cause), friction second (systems resist), simple machines last (systems can be redesigned to work with resistance instead of against it) — building toward a summative where students design and justify a simple machine solution.
Coverage check (a plain table proving nothing prescribed was dropped):
| Non-negotiable content | Where it lives in the new unit |
|---|---|
| Definition of force | Lesson 1, Systems intro |
| Newton's three laws + calculations | Lessons 1–3 |
| Static/kinetic friction | Lessons 4–5 |
| Mechanical advantage, simple machines | Lessons 6–8 |
| Required practical | Embedded in Lessons 5 and 7 |
Contrast with the weak version: a teacher bolts a single "STEM context" lesson onto the front of the existing textbook sequence, changes nothing else, and calls it "MYP-ified." The content coverage is identical — but there's no conceptual spine, the SOI (if one exists) predicts nothing about the later lessons, and by lesson 3 it's back to being a straight content march. That's decoration, not reorganisation.
Apply It
Teacher Activity: Run your next prescribed topic through the four-step conversion.
- List the non-negotiable content. Pull your actual curriculum document (MOET or otherwise) and write out every required item for your next topic — no summarising yet, just the raw list.
- Identify the concept it best serves. Which MYP key concept and related concept does this content illuminate, not just fit into? Test it: could you write one sentence connecting the content to the concept that a stranger would find plausible?
- Choose a context that gives it purpose. Pick a global context and a specific, concrete scenario (not "real-world applications" — an actual situation students can picture).
- Re-sequence toward a summative. Decide what students will produce at the end, then order your lessons backward from that, checking each non-negotiable item has a lesson home.
Finish by building your own coverage-check table, exactly like the one above — your non-negotiable list on the left, lesson location on the right. If any row is blank, that content got lost in the redesign; fix it before moving on.
Artefact: a completed four-step conversion plus a filled coverage-check table for one real upcoming topic.
Avoid This
"I designed the beautiful unit first, then panicked about the syllabus." Symptom: you finish planning and only then check the curriculum document, finding gaps. Fix: content map always comes first — step 1, not step 4.
"I taught the required content, then added an MYP wrapper at the end." Symptom: your SOI and summative feel unrelated to what students actually did most days. Fix: the concept has to organise the sequence, not decorate a finished one.
"I assumed MOET and MYP content overlap enough that I don't need to check." Symptom: you discover in the exam period that something wasn't actually taught. Fix: always build the explicit coverage-check table — assumption is not verification.
Check Yourself
Can you state, without notes, the four conversion steps in order? And can you explain in one sentence the difference between "coverage" and "sequence" — the distinction that gives you room to redesign without dropping anything required?
Continue Learning
Next step: Article 28 catalogues the ten mistakes that most often undo units like the one you just built — including some that show up specifically during content conversion.